


Last Stand

by BettlerWerdenFuerstenbrueder



Series: ZMcZ Prompt Ultramarathon [3]
Category: El Goonish Shive
Genre: Ethics, Gen, Guns, Murder, Navel-Gazing, Suicide, Vigilantism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-10
Updated: 2016-12-12
Packaged: 2018-09-06 21:44:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8770498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BettlerWerdenFuerstenbrueder/pseuds/BettlerWerdenFuerstenbrueder





	1. Chapter 1

Criminal judge Stephen Byrne was found murdered in spectacular fashion in his own office.  Someone besides him had used his codes, and must have known his habits, to know marital difficulties had left him hiding there doing Sudoku most evenings.  This made the police think that someone had been stalking him, but whoever it was, they left no signs.  The wounds all seemed to come from a sword, a sword long enough no one could possibly conceal it, but no one had reported anything like that.

Bail agent William Dyer was next to be found dead.  Again, sword wounds, and again, an apparent familiarity with his movements.  While tailing a fugitive, somehow he'd picked up a tail of his own, and his body was found in the woods.  They ruled out his mark fairly quickly, but damned if anyone else could be found.  One person they'd considered was a young woman seen, and captured on CCTV, in the vicinity despite living some fifty miles away, but there was no reason at the time to treat her with any special suspicion.  If they had looked into her more deeply, they might have found she owned a sword.

The sheriff of the next county over, Michael Hartley, was next.  The location shift was puzzling - maybe the killer was trying to hide their MO?  The murders were all committed with the same or similar swords, which was a calling card if there ever was one, and all of them at a point in someone's movements that suggested a stalker, a stalker who had never been seen.  It could only have been the bad press the three of them had been receiving, to which the sheriff of Byrne and Dyer's county, a woman, had nothing similar.

The killer's Waterloo was alternative media mogul William Morley.  This time, she was sloppy.  The relative difficulty of finding an opening in his more public life, along with a touch of paranoia, had made it harder for her to cover her tracks, which made it harder to get him at an opportune time.  He'd had long enough to raise holy hell, screams that had drawn attention, and plenty of witnesses could ID her from the closed-circuit footage from the previous case.  They had their woman, and her name was Tiffany Pompoms, eighteen, living in Moperville.

The first sighting of her in Moperville after Morley's death was on top of the school building, Sunday noon.  All entries and stairwells were barricaded, and the fire stairs destroyed, charges set by a little fairy.  Fire engines, helicopters, this wouldn't keep them away for too long, not for such a high-profile case, but Susan's goal wasn't to hold out forever, just long enough for a certain someone to show up... and there she was.

"Well, if it isn't the big-boob boy scout."

"Susan," asked Cheerleadra, "what the hell are you doing?"

"Waiting for you."

"That's not what I meant."

Susan shrugged.  "I have no regrets.  The country right now needs an example to destigmatize direct action."

Cheerleadra adopted an exaggerated look of befuddlement.  "De- what now?"

Susan smiled.  "Heh.  Exactly."

Cheerleadra put a hand on her hip, and in that gesture seemed to Susan and to those of the crowd below who believed the rumors to fall back into the luggish persona her male form took in Susan's video show.  "Really?  That old cliché?" she said.

"Weren't we in the habit of saying, clichés have their use?"

"To communicate, Susan!  That's what we said" - the heat of the moment must have gotten to her, since she alluded without missing a beat to having said this thing she usually so fervently pretended someone else had said - "the use of a cliché is to communicate."

"Indeed, in this case, to communicate who it is doing the obfuscating."

"I think I'm being pretty freaking forthright!"  In the way Cheerleadra gesticulated, in the way she bent and spread her legs, one could picture a semicircular couch around the two of them, except for the fact that Susan stood perfectly straight.

"I didn't say it was you."

"Who then?"

"Everyone who has left you where you are today, a grown adult befuddled by something so simple, so necessary.  Look."  She gestured to the police below.  "What are they doing here?"

Cheerleadra cranes her neck downwards, and her entire body rose, a counteraction so unnatural and yet so natural for one suspended in midair.  "The police?" she asked.  "They're here to arrest you."

"Why?" Susan asked.

"You killed four people."

"So if I'd killed three, it would have been all right?"

"Well, no, of course not.  Even one."

"So a siege like this might be mounted for anyone who killed someone?"

"Of course."

Susan gestured at a particular block, barely visible from the two girls' high vantage point.  She could have meant any of a dozen buildings in that direction, but she sensed that Cheerleadra would follow her intent.  "Then why aren't they under siege?"

"The VFW?"  Cheerleadra "jumped" a few inches.  "That's not the same at all!"

Susan laughed.  "No, it isn't.  How?"

"They... how is it the same?!"

"Anyone who killed someone," Susan repeated.

"Who murdered someone," said Cheerleadra.  Cheerleadra's eyes then became unfocused for a moment, and drifted just above Susan's head; she was talking to herself, and merely facing her.  "Susan, you murdered those people."

Susan brushed her chin.  "Murdered?  What do you mean by that?"

"Well, didn't you?"

"I did.  But what do you mean by it?"

"You killed them!"

"We've already established that's not it."

"You had no right to kill them."

"I see," said Susan.  "And where might I have applied for the right?"

"Applied for it?" asked Cheerleadra.

"That's right, applied for it.  If one can get that right, what are the proper forms to fill out?  Where do I file them?"

"No one had that right!"

"The right to kill?"

"The right to kill them."

"So those four merited special protection?" asked Susan.

"No," Cheerleadra said automatically, and she paused to think a moment before continuing.  "Just, they hadn't lost ordinary protection."

"And how could they have lost that protection?"

"By being a threat to someone else's life."

Susan shrugged.  "They were all a threat to someone's life."

"Not a direct threat," said Cheerleadra.

Susan's eyes lit up.  "Ah!  I see.  The distinction is a mass game of peekaboo, where death exists only where it doesn't hide its face."

"No - where death, where violent death is imminent."

"So we allow the machine to grind its way through bone until a gear starts to wobble."

At that, Cheerleadra laughed.  "Okay, I get it, you're doing the old 'heroes react' line.  How many times have we made fun of that one?"

Susan smirked.  "Yes, didn't we just?  So many villains liked to say it.  Did you ever wonder why?"

"It's a copout by lazy writers trying to write evil, who pretend to get into flat villains' heads by adapting their own narrative structure."

"Narrative structure.  Consider that structure - the world is broken, the world is repaired.  The audience cheers.  Their world is reinforced."

"That's not always true."

"In some, which seldom feature the narrative device you allude to, the world comes pre-broken, and the hero has to make it more like the audience's, or at least more like the audience's self-image.  Same effect, only this time with a side of toxic masculinity.  Either way, consider in whose heads exists the world you and I have immersed ourselves in."  Susan waited for Cheerleadra to respond, but she was just floating there, looking into her eyes, waiting for her to continue.  "A band of comfortable fo-... no, comfortable  _men_ , almost all of them men, whose brand of labor fulfills the desires of the decadent, making false claim to the necessity of art, sending figureheads to play auteurs while the corporate capitalist machine the writers were and are happy cogs in continued to turn.  Art itself was absorbed by the machine, and there's hardly a better emblem of this than you and I."

"What are you talking about...?" asked Cheerleadra.

"Like all art, we build on a foundation laid down before us, but the corporate machine's pull on the levers has relegated any such construction except as they provide to a secondary class of art, and it just so happens that the best way for one outside their machines to reach the masses is to so relegate oneself, and in doing so, to immerse ourselves spiritually as we feed the machine materially, and so push the cycle along."

"What does this have to do with anything?"

"It has to do with why you're" - Susan craned her neck briefly toward Cheerleadra's pointed toes - "'standing' there.  Why you understand implicitly that I'm to be stopped by any means necessary, only hoping to mitigate the necessary means, because I bloodied my hands pressing out of sync the blood-soaked gears of the great machine.  You and I, we've immersed ourselves in the brainwashing of those who have a vested interest in telling us, it's okay.  Only when someone steps out of line do they need to be put in their place.  All the while, they allow little whispers to get out, the gears themselves are broken.  Don't fix them - they're broken - but if you fix them, you're the evil one - but they're broken, and the villain may as well be me."

"Susan, you're babbling."

Susan took a step forward, right to the edge of the building, and held out her hand.  "Manus haec inimica tyrranis..." she summoned her sword, continuing, "...ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem."

Cheerleadra darted toward Susan, arm out to grab the sword, but she stopped herself, unfurling her hands into a "stop" gesture.  "Susan, please, put that away."

"Elliot, what do you think is going to happen at the end of this little standoff?  That we'll sit down and do a review?"

Cheerleadra floated closer, not even seeming to know she was.  "I don't know."

With that, Susan knew Cheerleadra was close enough, both mentally and physically, for Susan to make her next point.  Thinking of that idiot mugger two weeks earlier who'd knocked his knife off its handle against the heroine's carotid, Susan put all her might into a swing of her sword.  She felt the precarious momentum pull her forward, but she wasn't too worried about that.  There wasn't much for her after this roof anyway.

Cheerleadra had been there for the incident Susan had only seen closed-circuit footage of, and she must have noticed how much of her weight Susan had put into it, as well.  She didn't flinch at the swing, allowing it to strike her in the flank.  Only when it made contact did either girl realize how the magic of the sword would interact with the magic protecting Cheerleadra's flesh.  Cheerleadra's eyes burst open, but she did not have time to scream as the sword sliced clean through her midsection.  The two parts of her body fell to the ground as the magic faded, becoming the body of the young man she usually was, showering police and reporters with little droplets of gore.

All assembled gathered around the body when it hit the ground.  They had all heard the rumors, they had heard snippets of the conversation where Cheerleadra had alluded to their truth, but most of them hadn't been sure what to believe.  This was confirmation if any was needed, if there was any need to think about that now.  In the horror on the onlookers' faces, there was no hint that any of it came from this little revelation, but only the gruesome sight before them.

In the chaos, no one thought to look back at Susan; when they did, she was gone.


	2. Chapter 2

The clerk tried to look as imposing as he could, not that he needed much help.  He turned to the rack so that the Gadsden flag on the back of his XXL denim jacket would be the first thing any customer saw, taking the opportunity to run his fingers through his greying beard.  He had seen out the window that that skinny little girl with the skinny little eyes was back, which meant a difficult discussion was due.

"Hey," she said, shaking already, "I'm here for the Ithaca?"

"Yeah, about that."  The clerk turned only his head.  "I saw you on the news. You were the one fucking that super-shehe."

"I don't see how that's any of your business."  The shaking had stopped.  Damn.

"Well, normally, it wouldn't be, just I checked the timeline, and you were here before the body was cold."

"I was here before I knew there was a body."

The clerk turned, putting his hands on the table and dipping his head so that his wild hair would frame his face.  A pregnant pause as he pretended to read her, to divine what he'd already decided.  "No, you weren't," he said.

"Fine.  I felt threatened.  I feel threatened.  My partner was cut in two in broad daylight."

"In a fight she picked."

"You're blaming her?"

"No.  But Pompoms only killed men, and only men in positions of power - there wouldn't have been a fight if your scissor sister hadn't flown up to her.  And there's a big difference in the options you have doing that with a goddess's strength and doing it with a tube of buckshot."

"And what's that to you?!" the girl snapped.  "It's your job to sell death to every idiot with the money - what's it to you if one of your customers has someone in mind, instead of some vague heroic fantasy a bunch of them are sure to bear out on innocent people?  And how many who had someone specific in mind do you think you've sold to already anyway, and will again?"

The clerk stood up, genuinely stunned by the little waif's outburst.  He crossed his arms.  "Yeah, I don't think I can sell you this."

"You don't have a choice.  I looked it up - in this state, once we signed that paperwork, as long as I still want it, you have to sell me that gun."

The clerk shook his head.  "Kid, I run this shop, I know the law, but even if that were true, I'd rather lose it than get this sort of blood on my hands."

"You think you don't have blood on your hands?"

"People die every day, and I'm sure I've played a role in a million different ways.  I only care when it's foreseeable, and this looks pretty goddamn foreseeable."

"You think I can't find someone who'll sell to me?"

"I'm sure you can."

"So why not make the sale?"

"I'd rather keep my own hands clean."

"So Pilate sells guns."

The clerk sighed.  "Kid, someone somewhere's being murdered, robbed, raped right now.  All you can do is keep your own hands clean."

Ashley did get her gun, from a weedy little thing in an anime t-shirt, barely older than she was.  When she first went in he'd looked at her with a pitying expression; when she came back at the end of the waiting period, the anime t-shirt had been replaced by one from William Morley's online store.  He rang up her purchase without the least concern.

She couldn't bring the gun home; her parents wouldn't stand for it.  She kept it in a lockbox in the trunk of her car, and would periodically drive around town, ostensibly looking for Susan, as if she'd see her walking down the street, but somehow, this time by her gun made her feel stronger, more prepared for the future.  Susan hadn't stricken since Elliot, so there was nowhere but Moperville to look, and she couldn't say she would actually look there if there were.

A month or so later, when her parents weren't home, she brought the lockbox into her bedroom.  She lifted the gun, loaded it, and, despite the safety course she'd been forced to take, put a finger on the trigger.  She waved it around the room, barely able to see what was in front of her, and soon pictured that it was Susan, pictured pulling it, pictured her crumpling before her, and giggled.

When her mirth began to fade, and she lowered the gun, finding herself pointing it directly at her bed.  When she saw it clearly, all mirth fell from her.  The bed became her madeleine, showing her all the times Elliot had been on it, in whatever form, snuggling, kissing, and yes, screwing.  She suddenly thought back to that time she'd had Cheerleadra use her cell phone power to make herself Ashley's human vibrator, and a smile again came to her face, only to fade with all the more force, as the happy memory became another grain of salt in the wound.

"I never would've guessed you to be the militia type," came a familiar voice behind her.

Despite this being exactly what she'd been looking for, despite the fear provoked by this unannounced entrance, Ashley didn't even move.  "Funny how people change when you chop up their lovers."  Out of the corner of Ashley's eye, something humanoid flew from under her bed to Susan behind her.

"I didn't think he'd..." began Susan, but stopped herself.  "Are you going to turn around?"

Ashley turned around.  She realized suddenly that she'd unconsciously taken her finger off the trigger at some point, and she kept the gun pointed down at Susan's feet.  She fought herself to look Susan in the eye.  "How'd you get off the roof?"

Susan smirked.  "Magic has..." she began, and suddenly she was close enough for Ashley to smell her breath on her own.  "...a flair for the dramatic."

Ashley slammed the muzzle of her gun into Susan's sternum, and fell back onto the bed.  Susan fell back, laughing as she caught her breath.  "Haven't quite got the hang of that thing, have you?" she asked as she got to her feet.

Ashley's finger was on the trigger now, and the gun pointed squarely at Susan.  In her mind's eye, she'd already fired.  Pellets had already fallen upon Susan's chest like drops of rain on a snowdrift.  Blood was already pouring through that little sieve, the pellets digging deeper to Susan's heart and lungs.  There in Ashley's mind they struck her heart and lungs, the soft flesh rippling as each tore through.

In Ashley's mind's eye, air trickled out from Susan's lungs as she struggled to breathe, and blood trickled in.  By this her blood got little oxygen, a state exacerbated by the loss of that blood to the holes in her heart.  It was a matter of seconds before her brain began to starve, her power over her limbs would have left her, if by then it hadn't already by shock alone.  She was down on the floor, and as her brain starved, her muscles heaved their last, her breath stopped, her heart stopped, her bowels emptied.  Only seconds before all movement stopped, and Ashley's onetime Sakaki was a pile of meat before her.

No.  She couldn't.  But... what else could she do?  How else could this end?  Ashley didn't move her finger from the trigger, but she lifted the gun's trajectory from Susan's body, first to the door above her, then up to the ceiling.  What she did next, she couldn't have explained if pressed, even to herself, but there was no one there to press her.  She lowered her trigger hand to stomach height, and pressed the barrel to her chest, muzzle beneath her chin.

A sword came down, slicing through both Ashley's wrists in a single stroke.  The gun jerked sharply to one side as it fired, pellets flying through the air, mostly coming to rest in the wall and ceiling, a few grazing or lodging in Ashley's face.  Ashley looked up at Susan holding the same glowing sword that had sliced through her boyfriend.  Susan unbuttoning her shirt was the last thing she saw before consciousness left her.

Having removed her shirt, Susan stabbed through it with her sword, using the tear so made to tear it open to the hems.  She pulled the hems over the sword in a final cut before willing it to vanish.  Around each of Ashley's bleeding stubs she wrapped one half of the shirt and pulled as tight as she damn well could, slowing the bleeding, but she was sure it wasn't enough.  She picked Ashley up in her arms.

She walked her to the hospital, teleporting every few steps to save time.  People gawked, but no one stopped her, not to help her or arrest her.  Those who would help her must have been too stunned, or just assumed she was some sort of underdressed magical paramedic.  Those who would arrest her must not have recognized her, or thought that carrying a wounded young woman, arresting her might put the other in danger, and she probably wasn't responsible.  Regardless, she made it there.

There was an armed guard at the emergency entrance.  On seeing her, he drew his gun, holding it against his hip, finger parallel to the trigger, and took a step forward.  He shook in abject terror; Susan smiled at him.  She went through the automatic doors, the guard following.  Loud, indistinct chatter emerged throughout the room.  She set Ashley's body in a chair, as the receptionist shouted something into a phone, inaudible from where Susan was standing, at least as far as she cared.  She put her hands behind her head and, still smiling, turned to the guard.


End file.
